What’s on this week

How do you continue when it feels like the world is in trauma? I didn’t have the words to explain to my three-year-old why I was sad yesterday after reading accounts of people caught up in the Parisian atrocities.

How can you explain it in a way that makes sense, when you spend your whole life reassuring them they are safe, and rules and adults are in place to help protect them?

The short answer is you can’t.

Sometimes words aren’t enough to express the fear and sadness.

It feels glib to focus on anything other than praying for those impacted by what’s happening in Europe and events around the globe right now, and my thoughts are with them.

Paris in particular is a special place for me and I’ve made lots of important life decisions there. It’s where I’ve gone to think and dream on numerous occasions in my life, I have friends in the city and my husband lived there for a year. It’s also where I chose to accept my husband’s proposal of marriage.

But I agree with numerous quotes I’ve read about how carrying on as normal defeats the purpose of those who seek to unleash wickedness.

We experienced that here in London in 2005 after the bombings. Getting back on a Tube for the first time was extremely difficult for many people, myself included. But life has to carry on, and you do so with a heavy heart and ache for people caught up first-hand in the difficulties and acts of terrorism.

So in order to seek to carry on, here’s my regular Sunday look at what’s on this week, it covers 15 – 25 November 2015.